James Watson begins his book about the discovery of the structure of the DNA, The Double Helix, with the story of a holiday meeting with Willy Seeds, a scientist who, rather than stop and speak to Watson, merely asks, How`s honest Jim? and walks on. Seeds was being sarcastic. Two years earlier, Watson had helped himself to other peoples data notably those of Rosalind Franklin, without permission or acknowledgement to arrive at his Nobel-winning conclusion. In her excellent biography of Franklin, The Dark Lady of the DNA, Brenda Maddox wrote: Rosalind Franklin has become the symbol of womens lowly position in the pantheon of science.
There have been 513 winners of the Nobel Prize in the sciences (physics, chemistry, medicine). Only 11, or about two per cent, have been women. Yet women scientists have pushed the frontiers of knowledge just as hard and with just as much determination as the men; for their efforts, they invariably brought fame and glory to the men they worked with. Joceyln Bell was the astronomer who discovered pulsars, energy emissions constituting a new class of stars; the Nobel Prize went to her professor for recognising the meaning of her work.
